Filling Pressures of the Left Ventricle in Patients With Significant Aortic Stenosis: Study of Echocardiographic Parameters Compared to Invasive Evaluation

Left valvular heart disease has become one of the most common heart disease in Western countries. This disease evolve over many years and are characterized by a long phase where the patient is "asymptomatic".

it is characterized by discomfort LV filling may worsen and lead typically to a pressure increase of LV pressure and the left atrium (LA) (1). The onset of symptoms is unpredictable and may occur at the stage of diastolic or systolic dysfunction.

Ventricular dysfunction may be insidious, the goal is to detect early dysfunction, knowing that it is often very difficult to know if the patient is actually symptomatic. The onset of symptoms sign an intolerance to the increase in LV filling pressures and LA , causing pulmonary hypertension .

Therefore, the study of the level of LV and LA filling pressures , if possible by a noninvasive method, would identify patients apparently asymptomatic even though their condition is advanced.

Pressures filling pressures can be explored by two methods:

• cardiac catheterization, which is a direct and invasive measurement method
• echocardiography, which is an indirect measurement method which has the advantage of being non-invasive The goal of this research is to compare the two methods.